• Age: 16 to 18
• Grade: 11 to 12

No one believes Marta can get better—not her sister, not her father—and she doesn’t care. But when a troubled, enigmatic acquaintance from her therapy group goes missing, Marta discovers what she does care about: finding Thomas Zimmerman.

For twenty-six-year-old Marta, group counselling is just a distraction from her dead-end job as a janitor and her serious vocation of smoking weed. She’s been living with depression, numbness and apathy for years, deep in what psychologists call hypoarousal.

In a rare act of engagement, she helps Thomas, a fellow patient who can’t wash the dishes because of the man in his sink. When Thomas disappears shortly afterward, Marta feels compelled to find the person nobody else seems to care about.

Through a hard Nova Scotia winter, Marta embarks on a quest that takes her to doctors’ offices, psychiatric institutions and the darker side of Halifax, where the homeless—the “Crazytown people of Sanity City”—dwell.

Is Thomas alive or lying dead under the snow? And is Marta really living or forever lost in the hypozone?

Susanna Cupido's profile page

Susanna Cupido is a student from New Brunswick who completed an undergraduate degree in English and psychology at University of King’s College in Halifax and is currently pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at Cornell University. Her poem “The Door” won the Accenti Poetry Contest in 2021 and her short story “Me Against Jim Bailey” was shortlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize in 2022.